Posted
by
Zonk
on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @05:12PM
from the time-for-extreme-programming! dept.

bonch writes "Well, Longhorn beta 5048 was released a day before the start of WinHEC 2005, suggestive of the fact that it is not terribly impressive. Paul Thurrott (a Windows writer whose previously reported review of Mac OS X Tiger was updated after user feedback) confirmed this today in day two of his blog from WinHEC. Microsoft needed something big to kill the hype of competitors, but screenshots show minor visual updates from the last beta, and to quote Thurrot: 'This has the makings of a train wreck.'"

What? How many killed and injured? An unfortunate choice of words, considering what happened in Japan. I think that's a bit colored anyway from someone who hates mornings and is undoubtably in a
less than spritely mood.

I thought the bit about "Longhorn will run fine on a 1GHz computer with 256 MB of RAM" being good (This is good news for today's PC users, some of whom are concerned that they won't have the PC muscle needed to run the next Windows.) rather
disturbing. Sounds like the thing is going to be an absolute pig, like XP and 95 before it. (Remember when they said you could run 95 in 8MB? We found you realistically needed 24MB) Even though RAM is cheap, I'm not fond of
loading 1GB into a box and then seeing about 1/3 of it taken up by stuff 'I may need and would be really neat if already loaded in memory so IE and other apps would appear to load quickly.' A bit like asking if someone has a pen knife and they
hand you one of those swiss army knives with the works, when all you need is just a small sharp blade for 5 seconds (you spend 30 seconds trying to find the actal knife blade in the Victorinox monster.) A PC is a hole in your desktop into which you continually shovel money. With Longhorn you'd better get a bigger shovel

Lovely screen shots. What about the operating system are they supposed to convey, other than it looks more annoying than even XP (I don't do icons in Explorer windows, I do Details.)

Following on from what you said, considering that the system requirements for XP Pro [microsoft.com] state a 300MHz CPU and 128MB of RAM, the real requirements for this thing could be huge. I'm sure many of you would strongly disagree with the idea that XP can run acceptably with 128MB of RAM.

Check you aren't running the 'nv' NVidia driver or standard SVGA driver if you have an NVidia card. That will make the graphics 'slow', as you describe. A 533MHz CPU and 256MB of RAM should be more than enough. Services that are just sitting there will 'sleep' if they aren't being used, so they shouldn't have too much effect.

The reason the Windows GUI appears 'snappier' is because it runs with the highest priority in the system. Microsoft did this to make its OS appear fast and, probably, because that's what many users want - a system that 'feels' quick. The X Windowing System on Linux runs (by default) with priority 0 (zero), where 20 is lowest and -19 is highest, and thus competes equally for system resources with web browsers, word processors and the like. Resource- and time- sensitive stuff like CD/DVD burning, music and video playback, and system processes typically run with higher priorities, but most of these are user- (or root-) tunable.

Calling something disastrous "a train wreck" is a long-established idiom that isn't going to just go away because a train wrecks. And frankly, I think calling it "an unfortunate choice of words" is just a big, steaming load of language-police bull crap.

I have been in a train wreck where people were crushed and killed less than a metre in front of me (no more taking front carriage for me). Even in that light I find nothing wrong with someone using that expression.

I would expect the system requirements of Longhaul to be significantly *less* than XP. Microsoft has already cut so many promised features, it will actually be a downgrade by the time it launches.
Of course you'll still need like 1GB of video RAM if you want that spectacular icon preview feature that is all that is Longhaul.

Back in the day I decided to challenge Microsoft's 4MB RAM minimum for Win95, so I took out the 16MB stick of RAM from my system at the time (AMD 486DX4/120, normally 20MB RAM - funky board with four 30-pin slots and two 72-pin slots), leaving 4MB.

The only way I could get it to even boot was to disable the Soundblaster 16 driver. The drive didn't take a break at all from swapping until I shut down.

Why MS ever come up with the concept that an OS was suuposed to be anything but a platform on which to run apps. I do not give a rat's ass about the OS. The OS doe not do any real "work." When it get in the way of apps, it is no longer of any value.

It probably helps to think of Windows in two different terms. 1) the Operating System 2) The environment. The OS probably changes very little from major release to major release. The environment, however, with all those background tasks, DLLs, pretty widgets and sounds are what seems to gobble up the majority of resources.

MS keeps bloating the OS, making apps ever less convenient and usable. MS seems hell-bent on "developing" itself out of business.

On the contrary, I think they've got some people who don't give a rat's patoot about hardware or kernel particulars, but just want a warm fuzzy computing experience and that is what they target. That and making sure there's always some incremental improvement which keeps you coming back every couple years and upgrading Windows or Office.

I haven't been able to look at the screenshots as the site appears to be slashdoted, but I find it impossible to believe that any UI could be uglier than XP. My major complaint with XP isn't really the look though, it is the incredible amount of screen space it wastes in favor of eye candy. The first thing I do with an XP machine is set it back to Win95 mode and pick the classic skin for media player (which is truly an abomination with the default skin). Of course, these days I hardly run Windows at all since Fedora Core 3 does everything that I need a computer to do, and does it better and for less money than any version of Windows. I doubt Longhorn will be a train wreck as there are millions of people that will upgrade no matter how good or bad it is, and Microsoft will spend billions persuading them it is the best thing to do. It is amazing that people never catch on to the old wine in a new bottle trick. Of course, in the case of Windows, we aren't just talking about any old wine, we talking about vintage 30 year old Gallo Hearty Burgundy.

I agree, I don't like the look of XP, that is why when I use a XP machine I change the look back to windows classic. One I do that, it looks and feels exactly like my windows 2000 machine.

And what do those screenshots tell us anyways? I did not see anything new, something to make me excited about the new windows.

Maybe Microsoft is stuck in their 1998 way of thinking, when the new "version" of windows had people lining up outside of CompUSA at 5am to get a good space in line to be the first to own the new version. That will not happen again. Windows 2000 can do just about anything a user wants, it can play DVD movies, surf the web, play games. Why do we need a new version of Windows?

I would like to see Micrsoft do 2 things they won't. 1) I want greater control of my PC, but with the push for more DRM, I will get less control of my machine. And related to #1, I want to have tools work my way, I want to opt-in rather than opt-out, I want most services turned off unless I turn them on. 2) I would like Windows to come with some more software than just solitare. I'd love to see Windows come loaded with OpenOffice and Mozilla, and a ton of Open Source software. It would be a great sign of stregnth, to give away those products and then tell people "You have Open Office which is good, but for something really great come and buy Office".

Maybe Microsoft is stuck in their 1998 way of thinking, when the new "version" of windows had people lining up outside of CompUSA at 5am to get a good space in line to be the first to own the new version. That will not happen again. Windows 2000 can do just about anything a user wants, it can play DVD movies, surf the web, play games. Why do we need a new version of Windows?

Because at some point Microsoft will force the upgrade by sabotaging existing Win2k installs. No more service packs, patches or support. Doubtless WMP-Longhorn will get some delightful codecs that will not work on Win2k.

Not just new features... they have to add features that people actually want. Apple does this.

For example, Expose was the big hit of Panther, and now Spotlight and Dashboard are going to be the big hits of Tiger. Sure, the performance and GUI enhancements are nice (except for perhaps the Finder), but they are a sideshow.

Microsoft needs to add something that will make people actually want to upgrade. They can say they will improve security, but that isn't something the average user will notice right away. In fact, it should be something the user doesn't notice at all since the OS should protect them in the first place. Microsoft needs to have something that has a tangible effect on the end user.

If people can't tell between XP (or 2000, or ME for that matter), they are in for trouble. Then they won't bother purchasing it. But if they see that there is a good reason to upgrade, they will.

Jaguar and Panther could both play DVDs, surf the web and play games... but Apple came out with features in Panther that made people able to do those things easier and/or better than before.

My point is that most new features are mostly marketing fluff, and if M$ wants really pull this off, they have to offer something truly innovative and useful.

This is exactly the lack of focus on essential detail that will make LH a sad, second-level retread of W2K for users. Yeah, it's got an improved driver and development model. Yeah, web services are integrated throughout. It drives like a tank.

Because the Control Panel is tightly integrated into the OS and thus the icon cannot and MUST NOT be changed. You cannot change the icon colours without changing the way the calc.exe does addition, if you change calc.exe, Windows Explorer will change to a maroon colour which then will result in kernel32.dll not being found which is needed by notepad.exe and thus it will not start-up and if notepad doesn't start, Internet Explorer will need to work "Offline" and we know what happens when Internet Explorer is "Offline", you cannot login to MSN Messenger!

grandma's gonna have a hard time figuring out what the "Shu..." button does on her large-text setupIt starts a game of shuffleboard, of course.

What I'd like to know is, have they done anything to make the actual shutdown dialog more useful? The button icons completely fail to depict what they're supposed to be. I had to use a Spanish computer one time and couldn't figure out how to turn it off. I'd never used Windows XP before, and those buttons are [somethingawful.com] absolutely [somethingawful.com] meaningless [somethingawful.com] without the text underneath them.

yeah, except red (stop) could be meaningfully used to convey all three, and yellow (how do you come up with an automatic association between yellow with "stand by"; if anything, it would be "caution" or "prepare to stop") and green (go) don't really apply to any of the three.

as far as the icons on numerous home appliances, i think the 'power' icons they use for shut down and stand by tend to be used fairly interchangeably, and i've never seen the 'tentacle' icon anywhere that i can remember.

at any rate, my personal pet peeve regarding the shutdown dialog, as someone who tends to use keyboard shortcuts far more often than the mouse, is that it is not clear which one is currently selected and which one will be activated when i hit enter. i usually hit the left/right arrow keys a couple of times and watch for the annoyingly subtle change in color to know which icon is currently highlighted before i hit enter.

Standard? I do recognize the broken circle with
a line through its circumference as a "power" button, because I have many devices with that.

But note: when a device is off, and I press
the button with that icon, it turns on. Conversely, if the device is already on,
pressing it turns it off.

So, now here I am presented with what seems to
be a power button, on a device that is currently
on. So pressing it should logically turn it OFF.

Except, hey, WTF, why is it yellow? And what's
that weird red thing next to it? I have searched
through my entire house, and I haven't found
a single device with that icon on it.
On the other hand, I've found paired on/off
buttons where a single line (|) means on,
and a circle (o) means off. I've always understood those to be switches dedicated to
on or off, and the combined broken circle one
to be a toggle.

So hell, now I don't know what to do.
Well, that happy looking green thing looks
to me like it must be a lively
"just keep things on please" button,
so I'll consider that a cancel button and
press that.

No, sorry. You've very likely seen the text and therefore know what the buttons mean. It has nothing to do with your brain.

And: name one device with a button that has a bunch of lines organized in a circle meaning "restart". A better icon for restart might have been something like a web browser's reload button, or maybe the "recycle" logo.

I couldn't figure out the difference between the red and yellow buttons. The icons are nearly identical, and with my experience with 'nix window managers, I figured that perhaps one of the buttons saved what programs were running before logging out, and the other one didn't... but then what would the green lines-in-a-circle mean? I couldn't think of reasonable meanings for all three buttons, so how could I be sure that any interpretation I had for one or two of them was correct?

Consider another common association: red means "incorrect" and green means "correct." So maybe the green button means "yes, I want to shut down the computer" and the red one means "never mind"? There's just way too much room for ambiguity, and besides, if the icons are so poorly designed that the only way to tell the buttons apart is by the color, they fail to be useful.

On the other hand, since they seem to have be pushing most of the important bits forward to release them for XP because of the delays in the Longhorn schedule, I'm just not at all surprised that their screenshots look like XP with a new coat of paint.

I really don't know what else they can do that's going to be terrifically revolutionary other than under the hood improvements. And they're being very tight lipped about those (what a shock).

It does seem interesting that they've been shedding features, seemingly backing off from most of the things that were supposed to make Longhorn special. In the mean time, Apple's powering along and giving Mac users exactly what was promised in versions of MacOS X. I think that's a bad sign by any standard.

Another bad sign is that they claimed that it would be finished in mid-2006 and now it's "holiday" 2006. So in theory they might release December 24th now.

As I remember them, betas of MacOS X were feature-complete but very slow, and then speeds improved as the release got closer. I wouldn't expect enough changes in the interface to make it less than disappointing to these reviewers.

Those indications make me feel the Longhorn project is in deep trouble.

*

I worked in a job when I had to support mainstream (non-computer people) with Windows systems.

Most of them seemed to like the Windows XP interface better because it was more cheerful. In fact, a few of them even liked Hotbar and didn't appreciate my suggestion to improve their slug-like performance by removing it. It was, after all, pretty.

So don't expect that everyone acts like a geek and removes it. I'm a pretty hardcore geek myself and even I prefer XP's interface to Windows 2000's gray Depression City.

Those indications make me feel the Longhorn project is in deep trouble.

I'm starting to think that they're at the same point Apple was at in the 90s: every attempt to build a modern successor to OS 9 from scratch crashed and burned horribly. They finally climbed up out of their grave by purchasing NeXT and turning NeXTstep into Mac OS X.

It seems that Apple was working on "an object-oriented OS on top of a new microkernel" in C++ since *1988*, following System *5.0*. They finally gave up on it in 1996, when they bought NeXT, which had many of the same concepts and was released as part of OS X in 2001...

It's a lot like reading the history of the space program, isn't it? First you've got airplanes that can go into space being ready any day now, and Mars by 1980, and now we're just happy if we can get satellites into orbit...

I'm just glad that I heard somewhere (I think it was a cnet article in the last couple weeks) that they're going to improve the ability for laptops to be members of multiple domains. That's a big plus...

...only if it's easy to disable. The last thing I need is my users joining to another domain and getting a)the other domain's domain admins have Administrator rights over the laptop and b)all the logon scripts and group policy of the other domain are convieniently applied to their computer. Translation for all you Unix and NetWare admins out there:it's like hopping over to a client site and giving root on your laptop to their admins. Why would you want to do that?

I have actually had end users join their laptops to the domains at client sites for one reason or another and my head started spinning around and smoke came shooting out of my ears. If they make this any easier I'll start doing flips in mid-air, I'm sure.

Like I said, easy to turn off then no problem. Easier to turn on and I will cry.

MS has been working on Longhorn even longer than they worked on Windows 95. So its appropriate to comment on the state of the beta after billions of dollars of work over a long period of time.

After 4 years, if this is all they can show, then I'm buying stock in Apple, because if MS attempts to "lock down" digital "rights", then people will be sprinting towards the Mac platform just as fast as they can to get away from this abortion of an OS.

As someone who runs Linux "development" versions (currently using FC4T2) and even runs unfinished software downloaded CVS at times, all I can say is, "I expect more from a preview version".

Seriously - you take prereleases so you can play with all of the neat new features; the downside is that you have to deal with the nasty new bugs. Something is wrong with this beta if you don't get new features...:P

I've never used a virus scanner/firewall with Windows XP/Windows 2000.

And that's why I just sent those pictures you took after school last Tuesday to your parents. I thought sending them from your Gmail account was a nice touch, didn't you, Bob? Only time will tell if your sister ever forgives you for stealing her panties.

I don't want to make an enemy here, but you've hit on one of my personal hot buttons.

The core vision of the company I work for is to make IT as you know it obsolete.

Seriously. Right now, computers fucking suck. Seriously. All of them, even the ones we make. Computers are absurdly unreliable, and ridiculously hard to operate. The mere fact that we've raised an entire generation of people who think that IT is a valid career choice is testament to how we've dropped the ball for the past forty years.

We're just now -- literally, just this week -- starting to get to the point where computers are beginning to understand two vital things: inference and implication. If I e-mail a document to somebody in my address book, my computer can now infer that that document is related to that person; when I search for that person, I get that document, or vice versa. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

Servers should be entirely self-configuring, entirely self-adapting. Can you believe that just a couple of years ago, people had to sit down in front of servers and key in lists of IP addresses to enable things like print services? You had to actually sit down and tell your computer about the printer sitting next to it.

No more. Now, with Bonjour (née Rendezvous, and please don't ask) computers and services are auto-configuring. This is, again, just the tip of the iceberg.

You're probably going to hate me for saying this, but IT employees contribute absolutely nothing to an organization. They produce nothing, they transport nothing, they collect nothing. They're an expense. One we hope to render completely obsolete.

Will we still need computer repair men? Sure! We need air-conditioner repair men. We need electricians. We need plumbers. But the idea that a small business should be expected to keep an air-conditioner repair man or an electrician or a plumber on staff full time is absurd. Someday, hopefully sooner rather than later, the idea that a small business should have its own computer repair man will be equally absurd.

On the contrary. The problem is that the general population had been fed a pipe dream to them, and now are finding it wasn't true. You are right now describing this dream.

I don't need IT people myself. Computers are easy to fix and service. IMHO, the largest problem ironically is with all the usability improvements that have been made.

Try with a comparison:Not so long ago, at a company that sells stuff the computers would run DOS. The disk would be nearly blank, the only thing running on it constantly would be the selling terminal application. It would be efficiently handled with only the keyboard.

Then there would be a big server somewhere handled by a few people without much trouble.

These days, the same computer runs Windows. It faces viruses and worms due to stupidities committed in the name of ease of use. The same application is now a GUI, which makes it really pretty, but adds extra workload in the terms of interface programming, which increases the possible failure mode, and makes automated testing harder.

The whole system is managed by an army of often poorly educated people, who run around the company removing viruses, reinstalling systems, and bitterly complaining that people can't just get into their head that life would be much easier without Outlook.

Not saying that the UI hasn't improved, but I'm pretty sure that for commercial purposes the DOS version of all this stuff was working better.

I don't want to make an enemy here, but you've hit on one of my personal hot buttons.

I generally like your posts, but this one was kind of dumb. Look, we've been hearing this promise for about 30 years now, and I don't think it's any more true today than it was then. The fact is that companies staff all of their mission-critical business functions and probably always will.

Examples? My company is not a shipper, but we have a full-time employee that handles shipping arrangements, puts incoming parcels where the belong, and has outgoing boxes ready when FedEx gets here. We're also not a staffing company, but we have an HR person. Neither are we a construction company, but we have a maintenance guy who also remodels our building as needed. Finally, we're not an IT consultant, but we have IT people on staff.

IT people will go away whenever companies no longer use IT. Until then, every place that depends on their services for daily operation will have employees that run them, just as they also have shipping, HR, and maintenance workers. I like your company (and would like them even more if you sent some free stuff my way, hint-hint), but you've done an excellent job of advancing the state of the art of the computers on the average employee's desk. That's just the tip of the iceburg for a lot of us, and no amount of CUPS-style printer autoconfiguration will change it.

He's complaining that the screenshots aren't very different? I thought the point of Longhorn was primarily the changes within the OS internals.
I could pop a Ferrari engine into a Pinto, and this guy would complain about the air freshener hanging from the mirror.

Where did you get that? I read all the links and a couple other of his blog entries and didn't see anything that mentioned why he disliked it at all - just that he was disapointed, and he will have "more about that later". Which makes it a fairly pointless story to discuss, but...:)

If I were to complain about this release it would not be because it was not different, but because many of the changes are bad. Scrollbars in a menu? That isn't an issue with lack of polish leading up to the beta release - that is a stupid idea that should have never made it past the design stage. There are a few other bugs shown - look at the column headers in a non-column view of the new file explorer, but those can be written of as pre-beta problems. The visual theme also needs alot more polish which is understandable for a prebeta, but I like the direction they are taking it.

But really there isn't much to say until someone that has tried it actally writes about it unlike this story.

He's not commenting on the objective quality of the OS; he's commenting on the quality of it relative to the last Longhorn release:

This is a painful build to have to deal with after a year of waiting, a step back in some ways. I hope Microsoft has surprises up their sleeves.

In other words, the OS is trending from promising towards disappointing. The whole point of the big screen dog and pony show is to build excitement about the coming OS (yes, even at the developer shows). By bringing out a version that seems worse than the last one MS is killing enthusiasm for Longhorn.

I actually like the new look. It is 20 times better than the default XP theme. I have to switch every XP work machine to "Classic" because I hate the "Fisher-Price" coloring scheme of XP. Computers should look professional and not like "My First Computer".

I watched the 1hr45min keynote from WinHec that included a number of longhorn demos. I haven't personally been playing with LH builds so seeing the stuff demoed was new to me. I thought it was nice. The desktop search capabilities that will be in LH client inspite of not having a real WinFS underneath are surprising.

I'm not interested in getting in a comparative argument with some other eye-candy oeprating system that apparently ships this month; i'm only speaking about longhorn in terms of what i saw demoed and comparing it to what windows xp does today.

One interesting thing i noticed is that i thought some of the demos would be a bit.. "cooler". The underlying possibilities with the new frameworks that are going in should really have some growing room in them that the demos really didn't convey.. or so i'd think.

The Metro format was a surprise to me as well. I'd be curious to see some sort of technical analysis of it. Note also that from a cursory glance it seems like a royalty free format that wouldn't necessarily shut out F/OSS implementations.

What's so exciting about an OS? Isn't it the apps that we really care about? As long as the OS is secure, doesn't crash, and runs what I want it to run well on the hardware I choose to run it on, isn't that what counts?

(And tack on "and is open source" as well for the perhaps 3% of the world who really understands why that matters...?)

If it is bad, Paul is the guy who should be the one to call it first, he's life is so tied up with Windows Development.

Second, by calling it a "train wreck" prior to release allows him to provide a nice counterpoint to his ridiculous cheerleading, so that when Longhorn is released, he can whoop and holler and say stuff like "It was touch and go for a while, but MS has released the greatest OS since TOPS-20!".

The fact that Longhorn likely WILL be a trainwreck is orthogonal to whether Paul would call it one at this point in it's development.

The Recycle Bin icon casts a shadow to the left. All the other shadows, including RB's own text, casts shadows to the right. Is it because the RB is itself in a shadow world halfway between here and oblivion??? Such subtle metaphysical goings-on in Longhorn!

I'm glad somebody else pointed this out. This made the rounds internally under the headline "What's wrong with this picture?"

Look, I'm not gonna criticize Microsoft for showing early, very rough code and having it look...well, early and very rough. If you go back and look at the Mac OS X public beta, or even the 2004 WWDC demo of Tiger, you'll find that our early builds differ significantly from the final releases of our products.

But the thing is...every single one of us, to a man, would be ashamed to show something like that in public. Seriously, we'd hang our heads in embarrassment.

Microsoft's position, of course, is, "Don't look at the icons or the controls. They're not important. We're demoing underlying technology." Which is fine. But that's not how we do things. If you're going to take the time to put a UI on a demo product at all, take the time to do it right. Don't just slap something on there and say, "Oh, this'll all come out before we ship." That's not fair to your product or your customers.

It's just another sign of the difference between our philosophy and Microsoft's philosophy. I don't think either one is objectively right or wrong, but I won't hesitate to tell you which one I think is better.

Yes, that explains why companies like Apple, and even Microsoft in their own, glacial way, are innovating on a fundamental level while Linux is...you know. Not.

I'm being totally serious now: Linux is easily twenty years behind Apple. Seriously. Think about where all the attention is going: Human-user interface design. That was Apple in 1985. Today, Apple is doing no-shit innovation.

Even little things make a huge difference. Linux, being almost a file-by-file clone of Unix, is crippled by a vast and interdependent web of system watchdog services. There's init, there's inetd, there's watchdogd, there's cron, all separate and overlapping services whose job it is to start services. All complex, all in need of configuration. What did we do? We scrapped it all, replacing the whole mess with launchd. A single service with XML (meaning self-checking) configuration files.

Do you know what happens on a Unix machine if your inittab file contains garbage data? The system refuses to boot! With XML configuration files, a config file that fails to validate will simply be ignored. The system will run in a degraded state until the file is corrected.

It's stuff like that. Yes, we're doing big-time flashy innovation with things like Core Data and Spotlight. Those are no-shit world-changing things. But we're not just glomming new services onto old infrastructure. We're evolving the operating system, replacing things that are dumb with things that make more sense.

I'm sure that's true. But it ain't workin'. Go look for yourself. Type Wo or Ya or Tu and tell me that they look right to you. Get somebody to fix it and I will happily stop spreading false informations.

I removed the/etc/rcX directories completely

That's fine. I was talking about/etc/rc, though, not the scripts under/etc/rc.d. When you typed "/etc/rcX," I was confused about what you meant. Sorry about that.

If you hose/etc/rc or/etc/inittab, your system will not boot. Jacking with init scripts like/etc/rc.d and/etc/init.d and other service config files like/etc/crontab will result in other run-time errors, but they probably won't be system-fatal.

That's quite different from "being harrassed by lawyers".

So if it were just the torch-and-pitchfork-waving Internet mob and not Moglen and his cadre of fanatics, that would somehow be okay with you?

Yes, I certainly did. The lesson? You have a very, very long way to go. I mean come on. Environment variables? And four different ones at that?

In order to localize, you have to adapt not just the UI language, but the number and currency formats, date and time formats, the system calendar and measurement units. For example, if you pick up your computer and move it to Tel Aviv, you have to switch the language to Hebrew and the writing system to right-to-left. You have to use the Hebrew calendar instead of the Gregorian calendar. You have to use 24-hour time instead of 12-hour time. You do get to continue to use the ###,###.## number format, but you have to switch currency units to the new sheqel and units of measurement to metric.

That's localization. Linux can't even approximate it yet.

Network autoconfiguration tools existed for a long time before Rendezvous.

You know we're not talking about DHCP here, right? We're talking about the fact that the routing table dynamically reconfigures itself based on available interfaces via configd. We're talking about the fact that if you're currently using your AirPort card and you plug in to an Ethernet port, all your services will invisibly move over to the new port instantly without interruption.

Beyond that, yes, we have Bonjour. Which, incidentally, we give away for free in a POSIX-compliant reference implementation on our Web site.

The goal of ZeroConf was to provide a way to do it (for network services) without the need of a server.

And that would have been really cool, had anybody actually done anything about it. Nobody did until we came along. We took the Zeroconf spec and turned it into Rendezvous, which thanks to a trademark settlement is now Bonjour. In the process, we built it into everything, created a compliance logo program for it, and distributed reference implementations to vendors. Now Bonjour is built into every network printer... thanks to us.

Quoting the same article again: When a file does appear in that directory, cron automatically starts running.

I've lost track of which article you're quoting. But believe me, okay? I'm sitting in front of a computer with Tiger right this very second. The cron daemon is not running.

How is a blind person supposed to read a lengthy tutorial? Aside from that, the document you refer to consists of a lengthy list of third-party work-arounds for services that should be a core part of the operating system. Should be? No, in this case, they have to be. It's a bootstrap probl

Essentially slashdot turned a story that should have been called "New longhorn build/screenshots" into major flaimbait.

I seriously think that Slashdot should allow their subscribers to "vote" on the new stories that most people don't see...or a subset..if to many people think it is bad it gets red flagged for Taco to stare at or something.

Those who dislike Microsoft should rejoice if this beta *is* a train wreck.

I am entirely confident, and have been for some time, that one way or another, Longhorn is going to represent Microsoft's last stand...this will be made even more certain if it is a failure. I've said it before and I'll say it again...Microsoft have never had a coherent roadmap after NT 4, and that fact is now clearly showing.

Bankruptcy won't be here for a while yet, but market irrelevance is coming up fast...I'm predicting that by 2012 at the latest, Windows' market share will have almost completely evaporated.

If you're a Microsoft shareholder, I have one word of advice for you at this point: Sell. This is one ship which, when the sinking process is closer to completion, you really won't want to still be on.

I just got done with their Internet Security and Accelerator training. This, plus the stuff i've seen in Longhorn, plus the other things I've seen remind me of the movie 'The Hudsucker proxy':

"Idea man treading water"

Microsoft has not produced ANYTHING compelling in the last three years. It's more an excercise of 'lets sell them on more features', rather than 'lets sell them on something that improves the experience'.

The constant treadmill arms race of spyware/patch/reboot (Which I've seen take well running machines and reduce them to perma-reboot) plus bloatware that sucks the life out of a P4 with HALF A GIG of RAM. (Have you noticed the difference in performance between a new installation pre and post Office 2k3?)

So, lets pitch the API, lets pitch the file system (oops, can't do that in time), lets pitch your old hardware, and lets do it in the usual lock-step upgrade deathmarch again.

I think they've run out of useful features to add...and I think it's gonna bite them in the ass.

yes.looks at apple. (see's the sexiness that is osx)looks at linux. (see's the shear glee of wobbly windows, and enlightenment)looks at 2k. (see's something that looks worse than os7, never mind x, and looks shlocky compared to any linux wm short of kde1)looks at xp and goes blind.

Considering the fact that the original betas of Mac OS X still looked quite a bit like a mixture of NeXT Rhapsody and the OS 8/9 style, and that changing the look of the UI is generally not all that difficult (heck, 3rd party apps can do it without even having any access to the source code) I wouldn't be surprised if the final version looks completely different from any current screenshots. Besides, they pulled a trick like that when XP came out; IIRC, all the beta screenshots just looked like Win2K.

It might be better than some linux UIs, however, we get to have more than 1 UI. At once. And even some of the crappy ones are more consistent, simpler in the "simpler is better" sense, and customizable.

I say this from Firefox running in Windowmaker with several partially obscured xterms peeking out behind it.

What I'm wondering, is whether M$ will have sense enough to steal OSX's network "location" feature, so that I don't have to tell customers that there is no easy way to set up their XP machine to have

Longhorn will be the decision point to whether my next PC will be an x86 or a Mac.

You're not alone, and I think it's reasonable to wonder if the future of the PC platform rests on how well Longhorn turns out. I can buy a Mac that performs, is dead-sexy (and small) enough to sit on top of the desk, and runs a really sweet OS.

Plus, a lot more people are talking about Macs than they are about the big grey box hidden under the table.

The homework where we know, time and time again, Microsoft neither gets the eye candy nor the backend right? Where we can neither call it good, nor pretty? Are you talking about that homework.

There has to come a point, mind you, it might not be the same point for everyone so I have to be a little tolerant, where you say "too little, too late". With me, that point has come and gone, and I cant believe that it's that far off for other people. But what do I know?

Do you pick the color of paint before the foundation of your house has been laid?

Obviously you have never built your own home or even seriously thought about architecture. Yes of course you pick the paint before you start the foundation. You don't want to be designing while in final production do you? That would be stupid.

Besides, you can't directly compare releases of Windows and Mac OS either by revision number or date. They're completely different beasts and are therefore subject to different validation.

What utter drivel. They're both operating systems, aren't they? Both offer the same basic functionality to users, don't they? If I were looking to migrate from one to the other, wouldn't I have to directly compare both on some level?

I believe the scroll bar is temporary until the "menu slide show" functionality is completed. Once that's implemented, the menu will show you one animated icon at a time with marquee-style text prompting you with, "Is this the application you wish to run?" After a two second delay the next menu-item is displayed.

Don't worry though if this sounds tedious. A set of slide show controls nested within the menu will allow you to skip forward, backward, and set the delay time between slides. Who would of thought such a rich user interface could be imbedded into a menu?